THE GUERRILLAS' WARNING fighting and losing. When the men of his Adacad Battalion touched down in Perquín that Tuesday morning in De- cember, storming from helicopters in a crouch, gripping their helmets tightly against the backwash from the rotors, the officers had in their pockets lists of names to hand to the National Guards- men. While the Adacatl captains mus- tered their troops, the Guardsmen marched off through the town and pounded on doors. They were big men, well fed, and they looked even bigger than they were, outfitted in high black boots and uniforms of heavy greenish- brown cloth, with automatic rifles on their backs, and razor-sharp machetes hanging at their belts. "In those days, if they came to your house to ask you to come with them to 'do something,' you'd end up dead," a Perquín man whom the Guardsmen VIS- ited that morning told me. When he heard the pounding and pulled open the door to find the Guardsmen there glow- ering down at him-they always glow- ered, for their business was, and had been since the early days of the century, to induce fear in the countryside and to stamp out rebellion from the moment it revealed itself as a lessening of fear in a campesino's eyes-this man could only try to control his terror as the Guards- men stared for a moment, then barked, "Hey, we have work to do! Come with us and help us do it!" The man came out- side, watched as one of the Guardsmen ran his finger down the list that Mon- terrosa's men had handed him, then looked up, exchanged glances with his partner, and murmured, "Ya vamos dándole." ("Now let's get started.") The Perquín man knew what that meant- the killing was to begin-and, in a panic, he began to protest, digging an identification card out of his pocket and begging the Guardsmen to look at it carefully. Finally, after a terrible few minutes, he succeeded in convincing these impassive men that the name on the list was not his-that one of the sur- names was different. Nonetheless, the Guardsmen husded him along the streets with them, and as they moved through town they pounded on other doors and collected other frightened men. Those men numbered ten by the time they reached a field in front of the clinic, which was a blur of unaccustomed activity: helicopters land- ing and hovering and departing, and, amid the blast and the roar from the ro- tors, hundreds of men in green moving about, checking weapons, cinching the straps on their packs, and talking among themselves as officers marched back and forth shouting orders. By then, several hundred of the Atlacatl soldiers had stormed off the helicopters, most of them in olive green, and a few in cam- ouflage garb above black jungle boots. On the shoulders of their uniforms they bore, in white or yellow, the figure of an Indian and the word "Adacad" (the name of a legendary Indian warrior who had led the fight against the conquistadores). To a practiced eye, they seemed a some- what different breed from most Salva- doran soldiers-more businesslike, grim- mer even--and their equipment was better: they had the latest American M16s, plenty of M60 machine guns, 90-mm. recoilless rifles, and 60- and 81-mm. mortars. But it wasn't their equipment that made them "the élite, American-trained Adacad Battalion" (as press accounts in- variably identified them). It was their aggressiveness, their willingness to "do the job": a willingness that the rest of the badly led and badly trained Army gen- erally lacked. In part, perhaps, this ag- gressiveness was instilled by American trainers-Special Forces personnel, who, beginning in March, had been coming over from Southern Command, in Panama, to show the Salvadoran recruits how to shoot and how to seize positions. Mosdy, though, it came from Monter- rosa. Among senior field commanders who in many cases, as one lieutenant put it to me, "don't even own fatigues," Monterrosa seemed a soldier of the clas- sic type: aggressive, charismatic, a man who liked nothing better than to get out in the field and fight alongside his troops. The Salvadoran grunts-mosdy unlettered peasant boys, many of whom had been pulled from buses or off coun- try roads and pressed into service, hav- ing received little training and less regard from their officers-loved Monterrosa for his willingness to get down in the dirt with them and fight. The press loved him, too: not only was he a natu- ral story but he was only too happy to invite reporters to come along with him in his helicopter. And, of course, the Americans loved hIm as well: Colonel John Cash, a United States military 61 attaché, speaks of" a hot-shot strategist like Monterrosa, whom I'd put up against any American hot shot." ^s the war moved decisively to the ^ countryside, the American gov- ernment was no longer able to deny that it had a major problem on its hands. The Salvadoran officers were showing themselves utterly incapable of fighting a war of rural counter-insurgency. Not only was the Army, with a total of thir- teen thousand men facing perhaps a third that many guerrillas, terribly pver- stretched, but its officer corps was bur- dened by a byzantine political structure and a perverse system of anti-incentives. The most important commands from the military point of view were from the point of view of most Salvadoran officers the least desirable, and the result was that those posts tended to be as- signed to the politically least power- ful, and often least talented, members of the officer corps. "The guys in the real combat commands tended to be the total incompetents," Todd Greentree, who was a junior reporting officer in the United States Embassy at the time, told me. "These guys would be sent out there to the end of the line, and they'd spend their days drinking in the I " cuarte. Embassy officials recommended, ca- joled, and finally urged reassignments, but changes, when they came at all, came only after enormous effort. The explanation was not just the superior po- litical and economic power of the right wing of the officer corps but the fact that the tanda system, in which class- mates, no matter what their failings, were fiercely protected, appeared nearly impervious to outside pressure-includ- ing pressure from the Americans, who were now pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the country. As the officers understood only too quickly, the ultimate sanction that the Americans could brandish-turning off the aid spigot-threatened to hurt the Ameri- cans themselves as much as it would hurt the Salvadorans, since the Ameri- can fear of a Communist EI Salvador taking its place alongside Sandinista Nicaragua had become overriding. Even during the final months of the Carter Administration, this underlying reality became embarrassingly evident, when President Carter, after cutting off aid in